It’s been a while since I talked about this “code hosing” tactic here and that’s exactly what it is and now that we have the extra support of the World Forum on Privacy, they too aren’t buying it and included their doubts in their recent report. As I have read so far around 3 million people in the US have been scored? Has anyone been told what their FICO score is with medication adherence? I would guess probably not although the fact that this bogus “scoring” system exists and turns profits for the company is not a secret itself, the results are and you may not ever know you have been scored.

If you read their web page all they need is a name and address to score you, and again we have not one clue on what their data sources are and for all we know they rely on unreliable sources like Facebook, and other social networks out there. Heck what if they found out your doctor’s name too and that’s not unusual as query monsters go after everything they can get. Look what we found with MD listings and what if they compared you doctor and the prescriptions with the other data to score you? Look at this hoax on MD Ratings sites and please don’t use them as a safe reference as they are just there to collect ad revenue and don’t care about the accuracy on what is online about the doctors. There’s dead doctors listed and ones that have retired, doctors on staff at hospitals they have never set foot in and so on.

The FICO medication adherence scores are sold to companies doing clinical trials and to health insurance companies and enough on the latter as we know what they do with data as they continuously score you again and again with any additional miniscule piece of data they get. How do we know about the accuracy of this test? We don’t because it’s proprietary and they have the black box formula, so to trust them is totally stupid as they don’t care what your score is, they want to make money selling it. Of course depending on your score, you may get denied care, money, etc.

This is just one example of what goes on out there with the “Scoring of America” and it totally non transparent, so it’s really hard to jump for joy and get excited when the government does a data dump of something I’ll probably never use and media uses it to create more stinking data news that for the most part could also without. Here’s right from the website and if this formula is proprietary and we can’t replicate to check for accuracy then it should be banned as illegal.

This is part of what keeps inequality growing in the US and the link below has lot more detailed information on this process. This is only one bogus “scoring” that we know about. What kind of scores do insurers give you when the look at your MasterCard and Visa records that they buy? How about your voice that’s recorded at insurer call centers to determine your current state of mind? It could go on as what happens when your voice score is then combined with your credit card expenditure scores and ran together for another score? By the way most all of this gets sold too as we have a huge data selling epidemic in the US with little care or concern as to how it impacts the consumer but generates big money for those buying and selling our personal data.

So for this reason, such practices need to be banned as there’s no transparency here, no justification that the scoring is accurate at all, white pages or not, there’s nothing except the fact that someone makes money on the thought that they have decision making scoring data about us on hand.

Watch video # 1 in the footer and see how how we all get duped with things that are just not true. If you want to see more like this and get further educated, visit the Killer Algorithm page and learn up on how this works and when to be a skeptic today, a lot of code hosing taking place. BD

Dark Arts of Mathemical Deception

Professor Charlie Siefe of NYU, a mathematician debunks clinical trials, and few other items to where data is spun and fools you, every day example, hear about the perfect butt algorithm and more. These are probably some things you have never thought about but again after listening to what he has to say, it’s time to think about being skeptical. Here’s a radio show that also talks about the same topics.

This video digs in a bit further with how fictitious business models are used by banks and companies do this too. The models are so complex that CEOs don’t even understand them. “Quants, The Alchemists of Wall Street will take you through how “math models” work at banks and financial institutions in a way that even the layman can understand. More videos like over at theAlgo Duping/Killer Algorithm Page. Bank of America will also tell you“IT’ is a business” how they make money.

Weapons of Math Destruction

This is a lecture where Kathy O’Neill, a former Quant who worked for a Hedge Fund (Weapons of Math Destruction) on Wall Street will tell you what is done with your retirement money and more. The banks and companies use technology to take advantage because they can. “Of course we are going to take advantage because our tools are our brains…if they could figure out a way to take advantage of pension funds they would, a good interview with explaining smart money and dumb money.

Algorithms Shape The World

This is a very good presentation done a TED Conference and really was the one that got everyone started thinking about algorithms and today it’s talked about a lot. As he says “if you’re an algorithm, life is looking pretty good, but can’t say the same for humans”. What is a black box? Nobody has any control over the flash crash. We have moved forward a bit but still we are writing the unreadable and lost the sense of some of what is happening. Nice plug for Nanex here with research.